Santa Luzia: A week ago, the cupboards of the Barros family’s humble concrete shack were empty.
Today, the family barely know where to stash the mountains of food in their kitchen, after 11-year-old Miguel Barros, one of eight siblings, pulled heartstrings across Brazil when he called the police to report: “We have nothing to eat.”
Miguel, whose mother had been feeding her children cornmeal and water for three days the only food the family had made a sad call Tuesday to Brazil’s emergency services.
When the dispatcher asked him what his emergency was, the slight, wiry boy replied, “Mr policeman it’s because there’s nothing to eat at my house.”
The dispatcher said he would send a police car to the family’s home in Santa Luzia, in the impoverished suburbs of the southeastern city of Belo Horizonte.
When officers arrived at the small house with the run-down dirt yard, they thought they might find a case of child neglect.
Instead, they found a story that has become all too common in Latin America’s biggest economy: a loving but impoverished mother struggling to feed her family as food prices soar and incomes vanish.
The officers went to the supermarket and came back with a brimming load of food including lots donated by the store owner, whom they told of the family’s plight.
Then the local press picked up on the story, and Miguel went viral. Donations of food and money started flooding in from around Brazil and beyond, turning the family’s once-bare kitchen into an overflowing mini-market.
“A huge amount of food arrived — so much different food, I don’t even know what it all is,” beams Miguel, throwing open a gloriously stuffed cupboard.